Snakes and Honey Bees and extra helpings of grace

We have a four-acre yard. This time of year, we spend hours cutting it. Well, actually, my husband spends hours cutting it.

Yesterday, I decided to be a good wife and take him a glass of ice water. I started my trek across the back yard. He saw me coming and stopped to wait. I handed him the water and told him I don't like walking in tall grass. . . I'm always looking for snakes.

He laughed. John knows my phobia. It is unusual for me to strike out across the yard, my feet bare. But, there I was, feet unshod.

As I walked back to the house, I kept my eyes on the grass two feet ahead of me - just to be sure no wiggly-thing was waiting for me.

And that's when I felt it. The stinging in the arch of my foot. I had been so worried about an unlikely thing that I completely forgot about the thousands of honey bees that are enjoying our clover-covered back yard.

To add irony upon irony. . . as my foot hurt like blue blazes, the line of a song kept going through my head. The song was stuck there - had been stuck there for some time. But now it seemed incongruous with the stinging pain in my foot.

The song?

A line from a responsorial psalm from Mass, one of the familiar ones the cantors call us to sing between the readings of Sacred Scripture.

I will sing your praise, my King and my God. I will sing your praise, my King and my God.

I smiled to myself. I am not a strong Christian. Sure, I'm working at it, but there are many things yet to perfect. And one of them is how I respond to pain. I usually complain. Sometimes I get angry.

I rarely praise God.

Yet, there I was. Praising Him. And I realized, as I so often do, that everything really is a moment of grace - if we (I) would have eyes to see.